What to do if you feel like you’re falling behind

Okay. Here’s a question from Junaid. Junaid writes:

“I am not getting the right idea. I have gone through a few iterations, and I have to abandon the idea and select a new one. I’m ready to put a lot of hours into this, but I’m getting nothing but frustration. I’m restarting today with a new idea, and I plan to spend the next 15 days with my full force.”

I get this type of question all the time in my Zero to Launch course.

The first time we launched the course, people joined, starting on Monday. And by Tuesday, people were commenting in the Facebook community, saying “Oh, my God…I feel like I’m falling behind. I don’t have an idea yet. What do I do?”

When I first read this, I started to laugh because after one day you shouldn’t feel like you’re falling behind.

I’ve spent years working on ONE idea, only to finally give up and discard it because it wouldn’t work.

So from the question above, I can promise you that 15 days is not enough time to truly test an idea, to know if it will work.

One of the most valuable ways I can give you advice is to tell you when your expectations are too high or too low.

For example, some people come to me and say, “You know, I think I’m going to convert 45% of the people on this email list into paying customers.”

And I can tell them, that’s probably not going to happen. I can also tell someone who comes in with the opposite expectations (of converting too low of a percentage of their list) what they can expect.

This type of information is really valuable to know because it gives you a benchmark to measure yourself against. Here, I can tell you that 15 days is not enough time to go through the process of doing research.

Rather than trying to rush through the process and create a website, we actually recommend spending a lot of time researching BEFORE you do anything.

We call this “front-loading” the work. This is a critical distinction between what we do and what many other people creating online businesses do.

We spend time deeply understanding who our customer is. We actually go through a process of creating a playbook, filled with insights about the customers.

What are their hopes, fears, and dreams?

What kind of product will they respond to?

What should the packaging be?

What should the pricing be?

That way, by the time we go to create the product, we know exactly what’s going to happen in the launch.

That’s why we have created more than 17 successful courses. That’s not an accident. We test our markets. We front-loaded the work so we guarantee our products will be a huge hit.

If you’re giving yourself 15 days and getting really frustrated, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Instead, try a different approach. Go through the process. Optimize for learning, not for revenue.

Know that every hour you spend right now is going to save you a hundred hours down the road.

Don’t get frustrated. This is all part of the process.

Now for more tips on finding a profitable business idea, I put together something special for you.

It’s a field report on how one of our students took her initial idea — much like you had — and slightly repositioned it to be extremely successful. Click below to get that field report.

How to make your business idea stand out

Learn how to guarantee your business idea will be a huge success with just a few, subtle tweaks in this free guide, Positioning Breakthroughs.↓